As someone who’s often been told how common she is, I take a close and proprietorial interest in the festive reveal of the most famous tea towel in the world. I speak, of course, of the blessed annual dishcloth printed with the latest list of Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common.
Shall we count the ways? When I was at the Lady magazine, my proprietor’s mother, Mrs Budworth, would spout forth to journalists who flogged from London to her cheerless Suffolk seat in search of juicy knocking copy about the ninth editor. She’d expatiate over tea about how my family consisted of pushy nobodies compared with hers (the Mitfords were first cousins). ‘Who do they think they are?’ she would cry. We will come to that.
I didn’t have the heart to tell my mother-in-law that, as things turned out, I was very bad at giving birth
When I became pregnant by and married my husband, who traces his forebears back to the Norman conquest on both sides, I started hearing the theory that the Waleses’ marriage was doomed because poor Diana had married down and the Windsors were gross Hanoverian nouves compared with the Spencers. I was also told by my aristocratic mother-in-law, née Lady Margaret Boyle, that I’d give birth with ease, the implication being that a woman of my rough peasant stock would drop babies out from under my skirts in the fields. She was always very kind to me, despite my lowly origins, and I loved her. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, as things turned out, I was very bad at giving birth, and it was always a miracle to leave St Mary’s, Paddington, in one piece with a live child.
Nothing changed even after the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? crack team of researchers established that my father’s mother was the direct descendant of George II via an energetic womaniser called Prince Paul of Württemberg. And we were related to every crowned head in Europe, as Granny Johnson always used to claim. It didn’t count. ‘Wrong side of the blanket,’ I’d be told.
Back to the dishcloth. Even though I’m common and also apparently ‘have no taste’, I continue to spam Nicky with suggestions of my own – influencers, stalkers, yachts, podcasts, Range Rovers, apologising for slavery (I said this in 2023), trellises, brown sugar coffee crystals, pot pourri, Queers for Palestine, society weddings and blue toothpaste – and to my joy some have made it on to the official list. Also ‘wheels up’, ‘from our family to yours’, ‘ciao’, ‘breaking bread’, ‘treading the boards’ and ‘making memories’, unless, of course, people are saying these clunkers ironically, which is different. That’s a terrific way of signifying how posh you are, like the Bright Young Things talking in cockney rhyming slang, or Margot, the late Dowager Marchioness of Reading, naming her dogs Horrid, Pardon, Toilet and Help! and getting a border collie in her nineties called Viagra.
And now, le tea towel 2026 est arrivé! It very much meets the moment, as we must say now, as it includes: being thin, stand-up comedians, people wanting to show photos on their phone and not finding them, pity, being ‘humbled’, beards and, here’s one of mine (yay): calling the Christmas turkey ‘the bird’. I once suggested to Nicky ‘Royals in navy’ was common and he included it, but I now wonder why, because how can navy blue be common? I can’t think what I meant.
When ‘Anne McElvoy’s opinions’ appeared on it last year, I was even more furious than about ‘The Speccie’. How dare a rival in irritating ubiquity appear on the tea towel of shame and not me?
I should probably explain how – apart from all the above – that I know Nicky himself thinks we’re common (aside from the fact that he once texted me during my show on LBC to say that both my callers and my replies were beneath me and I must desist at once). Well, in 2021 he put in ‘books about Churchill’ (Boris wrote a bestseller called The Churchill Factor) alongside celebrity ambassadors, Frida Kahlo and baby showers.
How dare a rival in irritating ubiquity appear on the tea towel of shame and not me?
In 2022 came the cold hard proof. You didn’t have to stand on your tippy-tippy-tiptoes to see what drawer we Johnsons came out of. My own father’s name was on the tea towel – well, he appeared as Stanley Johnston (there are occasional typos on the £50 tea towel, which is odd for someone so detailed, but then Haslam has written a book called The Impatient Pen, so maybe he is like my father, an old man in a hurry). My own father, up there with the common people such as Grayson Perry, P.G. Wodehouse, Ed Sheeran, James Bond, Bach and ‘Anna Wintour’s “routine”’. I told my father that even with the collector’s item spelling mistake, this was the highest honour.
My husband once accused me of writing books ‘only to have the launch party’, but the truth is I only have parties to invite darling Nicky. Just as everyone needs an editor, even him, we all need an arbiter elegantiarum too.
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